How to disable phone number linking in Mobile Safari?

Question

Safari on iPhone automatically creates links for strings of digits that appear to the telephone numbers. I am writing a web page containing an IP address, and Safari is tur

Answer 1

I was really confused by this for a while but finally figured it out. We made updates to our site and had some numbers converting to a link and some weren't. Turns out that numbers won't be converted to a link if they're in a <fieldset>. Obviously not the right solution for most circumstances, but in some it will be the right one.

Answer 2

<meta name = "format-detection" content = "telephone=no"> does not work for emails: if the HTML you are preparing is for an email, the metatag will be ignored.

If what you are targeting are emails, here's yet another ugly-but-works solution for ya'll:

Example of some HTML you want to avoid being linked or auto formatted:

will cease operations <span class='ios-avoid-format'>on June 1,
2012</span><span></span>.

And the CSS that will make the magic happen:

@media only screen and (device-width: 768px) and (orientation:portrait){
span.ios-date{display:none;}
span.ios-date + span:after{content:"on June 1, 2012";}
}

The drawback: you may need a media query for each of the ipad/iphone portrait/landscape combos

Answer 3

Think I've found a solution: put the number inside a <label> element. Haven't tried any other tags, but <div> left it active on the home screen, even with the telephone=no attribute.

It seems obvious from earlier comments that the meta tag did work, but for some reason has broken under the later versions of iOS, at least under some conditions. I am running 4.0.1.

Answer 4

To disable phone number detection on part of a page, wrap the affected text in an anchor tag with href="#". If you do this, mobile Safari and UIWebView should leave it alone.

<a href="#"> 1234567 </a>

Answer 5

I had an ABN (Australian Business Number) that iPad Safari insisted on turning into a phone number link. None of the suggestions helped. My solution was to put img tags between the numbers.

ABN 98<img class="PreventSafariFromTurningIntoLink" /> 009<img /> 675<img /> 709

The class exists only to document what the img tags are for.

Works on iPad 1 (4.3.1) and iPad 2 (4.3.3).

Answer 6

Same problem in Sencha Touch app solved with meta tag (<meta name="format-detection" content="telephone=no">) in index.html of app.